Categories
Publications

Covid-19 vaccine candidate is unimpressive: NNTV is around 256 – BMJ

Pfizer’s vaccine “may be more than 90% effective.” (Mahase, BMJ 2020;371:m4347, November 9) Specific data are not given but it is easy enough to approximate the numbers involved, based on the 94 cases in a trial that has enrolled about 40,000 subjects: 8 cases in a vaccine group of 20,000 and 86 cases in a placebo group of 20,000. This yields a Covid-19 attack rate of 0.0004 in the vaccine group and 0.0043 in the placebo group. Relative risk (RR) for vaccination = 0.093, which translates into a “vaccine effectiveness” of 90.7% [100(1-0.093)]. This sounds impressive, but the absolute risk reduction for an individual is only about 0.4% (0.0043-0.0004=0.0039). The Number Needed To Vaccinate (NNTV) = 256 (1/0.0039), which means that to prevent just 1 Covid-19 case 256 individuals must get the vaccine; the other 255 individuals derive no benefit, but are subject to vaccine adverse effects, whatever they may be and whenever we learn about them……We’ve already heard that an early effect of the vaccine is “like a hangover or the flu.” Will vaccinees who are later exposed to coronaviruses have more severe illness as a result of antibody-dependent enhancement of infection (ADEI), a known hazard of coronavirus vaccines? Is there squalene in the Pfizer vaccine? If so, will vaccinees be subject to autoimmune diseases, like Gulf War Syndrome and narcolepsy that have been associated with the adjuvant?

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4347/rr-4

Categories
News

Pfizer to pay £50m after deaths of Nigerian children in drug trial experiment – The Independent (2009)

Article date: Monday 6 April 2009

At stake at one point last year was more than $8bn in punitive damages being sought in a string of cases, as well as potential jail terms in Nigeria for several Pfizer staff. “There has been a complex web of cases with proceedings in Connecticut, New York, Lagos, Abuja and Kano,” Mr Etigwe said. “The strategy of big companies when they are dealing with smaller opponents is to stretch the process, to overwhelm us until we are ready to accept whatever they want to offer.” Trovan never became the blockbuster that Pfizer had hoped for and it is no longer in production. The EU has banned the drug and it has been withdrawn from sale in the US.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/pfizer-to-pay-16350m-after-deaths-of-nigerian-children-in-drug-trial-experiment-1663402.html

Categories
Publications

Covid-19: GPs to get £12.58 per dose to deliver vaccine from December – BMJ

Practices will be paid £12.58 (€14.15; $16.69) per vaccination. This is 25% more than the current £10.06 practices receive for an influenza vaccination, in recognition of the need for extra training, post-vaccine observation, and other associated costs. Practices will need to provide most of the required staff from their own workforce.

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4354

Categories
Publications

Study to Describe the Safety, Tolerability, Immunogenicity, and Efficacy of RNA Vaccine Candidates Against COVID-19 in Healthy Individuals – NIH

Actual Study Start Date :April 29, 2020
Estimated Primary Completion Date :June 13, 2021
Estimated Study Completion Date :December 11, 2022

https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04368728?term=Pfizer&cond=SARS-cov-2&draw=2&rank=1

Categories
Videos

PCR Pandemic: Interview with Virus Mania’s Dr Claus Köhnlein

https://youtu.be/-LToSnpz8A4
  • AIDS was a testing pandemic, just like COVID-19.
  • Many of the excess deaths for COVID-19 were due to inappropriately high dosages of hydroxychloroquine during experimental study trials.
  • High COVID-19 excess deaths stopped after the trials were ended.
  • Professor Martin Landry, leader of the UK-based Recovery trial, may have made a mistake in proposing high dosage of hydroxychloroquine. It seems he confused it with diiodohydroxyquinoline, treatment for treatment of amoebiasis.
  • The treatment caused the damage.
  • The danger of over-treatment is everywhere because the industry wants to sell diseases.
  • COVID-19 is a self-limiting disease.
  • The data shows that COVID-19 has no more killing potential than the yearly flu.
  • Masks and lockdowns are ridiculous and damaging the whole population.
  • It’s a political thing and not a health problem.
  • Remdesivir is an immunosuppressant and useless against COVID-19.
  • You have to live with viruses and you can’t fight against them.
  • There is no treatment against COVID-19.
  • The treatment against COVID-19 is to rest, like the flu.
  • The problem is testing. If you stop the test, you’ll see nothing.
  • Lockdowns were an overreaction.
  • Vaccines are probably not a solution. You’ll have to vaccinate everyone every year. It’s good businesses.
Categories
News

Has Covid killed off the flu? Experts pose the intriguing question as influenza cases nosedive by 98% across the globe – Daily Mail

There’s just one curious problem: flu, it seems, has all but vanished.

The disappearing act began as Covid-19 rolled in towards the end of our flu season in March. And just how swiftly rates have plummeted can be observed in ‘surveillance’ data collected by the World Health Organisation (WHO). 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8875201/Has-Covid-killed-flu.html

Categories
Publications

MHRA urgently seeks software tool to process the expected high volume of Covid-19 vaccine Adverse Drug Reaction – Tenders Electronic Daily

TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) is the online version of the ‘Supplement to the Official Journal’ of the EU, dedicated to European public procurement.

The MHRA urgently seeks an Artificial Intelligence (AI) software tool to process the expected high volume of Covid-19 vaccine Adverse Drug Reaction (ADRs) and ensure that no details from the ADRs’ reaction text are missed.

https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:506291-2020:TEXT:EN:HTML&tabId=1

Categories
Opinion Videos

Dr. Mike Yeadon on The James Delingpole Channel

https://youtu.be/sbMJoJ6i39k

Interview highlights

  • COVID-19 is not a dread disease that will kill everyone.
  • The initially high case fatality rate of COVID-19 was because the medical community didn’t know how to treat it.
  • The fatality rate of flu is 0.1% (1 in every 1,000 who are infected end up dying).
  • Ventilators are the wrong option if you do not have an obstructed airway disease.
  • Prod. Ioannidis: The infection fatality ratio of COVID-19 is 0.15%. This is pretty much the same as the flu.
  • We should just ask people to be careful but otherwise go about your daily life.
  • These things pass every year. This is the first ‘social media pandemic.’
  • The normal practice for intensive care beds in the NHS is to run them almost full. This is because a lot of intensive care bed assignment is planned.
  • ICU use at the height of the pandemic was has very low because the NHS was run as light as possible to cope with a second wave.
  • Respiratory viruses don’t do waves.
  • This is not opinion but is basic understanding among experts in the field. It is supposrted by the highest quality science. Sir Patrick Vallance knows this.
  • COVID-19 follows the Gompertz Curve.
  • You have immunity after your body has fought off a respiratory virus. If that was not the case, you’d be dead. Immunity probably lasts decades based on evidence from other viruses.
  • Gompertz Curve is identical in all heavily infection regions.
  • Something awefull happened in the middle of the year: PCR swab test.
  • It is not true that if you test more people you’ll save more lives. A certain percentage of the test will come up positive even if there’s no virus in you.
  • False positive rate wasn’t released.
  • Kate Barker wrote in a government document on June 3rd, 2020, to SAGE: test has an unknown false positive rate; based on similar tests it may be between 1%-2%. This is a big deal.
  • Based on 1%: for every 1,000 people you test, 10 will come back positive, even if they don’t have the virus. If prevalence is only 0.1% as reported by ONS, only 1 in 1,000 will be genuine. This means 9 in 10–in other words 90%–are false.
  • Pillar 2 testing would have caused of the most of the positives to be false.
  • 1,700 people die normally every day in the UK. During the summer, only about 10 were dying per day of covid.
  • More testing, more false positives. We’ll never escape covid if we keep testing because most of the positives will be false. This is immunology 101. Sir Patrick Vallance would have known this.
  • Influenza is a high mutation-rate virus. Coronaviruses are relatively stable so once you’ve recovered, you are probably immune for decades.
  • COVID-19 kills 0.15%-0.2%, slightly more lethal than the average flu. Once it’s gone through the population, it won’t come back.
  • 99.94% survive COVID-19 and will be resistant for a long time.
  • COVID-19 is 80% similar to SARS-COV-1.
  • People who were exposed to SARS have T-cell immunity 17 years later. Evidence for COVID-19 all point in direction.
  • Our bodies have many lines of defense, including innate immunity and T-cells. Antibodies are in the last line of defense.
  • Study shows around 30% prior immunity to SARS-COV-2. It was due to exposure to common-cold coronaviruses.
  • The claim made by Sir Patrick Vallance that more than 90% are susceptible is a lie.
  • Mass testing of the well populating is the worst problem as it generates false positives, fear and control.
  • If you’re immune, you can’t be infected or infectious. Herd immunity is already in play in London.
  • If SAGE is correct, London should be ‘ablaze’ with deaths.
  • Current testing methods are not forensically sound.
  • Tests detect common cold and dead virus.
  • SARS-COV-2 has never really been a public health emergency.
  • We do not need the vaccine to return to normal. Most people are not in danger from COVID-19. More people are in danger from car crashes and we accept that risk.
  • Best case scenario is that the vaccine is 50% effective. Natural immunity might be better.
  • The most vulnerable often don’t respond well to vaccines and die anyway.
  • SAGE is giving lethally wrong advice.
  • The reason the pandemic is not over is because SAGE says it’s not.

Categories
Publications

Will covid-19 vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us – BMJ

The world has bet the farm on vaccines as the solution to the pandemic, but the trials are not focused on answering the questions many might assume they are.

…But the truth is that the science remains far from clear cut, even for influenza vaccines that have been used for decades. Although randomised trials have shown an effect in reducing the risk of symptomatic influenza, such trials have never been conducted in elderly people living in the community to see whether they save lives.

Only two placebo controlled trials in this population have ever been conducted, and neither was designed to detect any difference in hospital admissions or deaths. Moreover, dramatic increases in use of influenza vaccines has not been associated with a decline in mortality 

Categories
News

COVID-19: Human Medicine Regulations amended to support vaccine rollout – Thomson Reuters Practical Law

On 16 October, the Human Medicines (Coronavirus and Influenza) (Amendment) Regulations 2020 (SI 2020/1125) entered into force. The Regulations cover temporary authorisations for vaccines, civil liability and immunity for participants in vaccination programmes, expansion of the healthcare workforce who can administer vaccines, promotion of vaccines and an exemption to wholesale licensing requirement.

https://uk.practicallaw.thomsonreuters.com/w-027-9751?transitionType=Default&contextData=(sc.Default)&firstPage=true

Categories
Publications

Could certain COVID-19 vaccines leave people more vulnerable to the AIDS virus? – Science

Certain COVID-19 vaccine candidates could increase susceptibility to HIV, warns a group of researchers who in 2007 learned that an experimental HIV vaccine had raised in some people the risk for infection with the AIDS virus. These concerns have percolated in the background of the race for a vaccine to stem the coronavirus pandemic, but now the researchers have gone public with a “cautionary tale,” in part because trials of those candidates may soon begin in locales that have pronounced HIV epidemics, such as South Africa.

Some approved and experimental vaccines have as a backbone a variety of adenoviruses, which can cause the common cold but are often harmless. The ill-fated HIV vaccine trial used an engineered strain known as adenovirus 5 (Ad5) to shuttle into the body the gene for the surface protein of the AIDS virus. In four candidate COVID-19 vaccines now in clinical trials in several countries, including the United States, Ad5 similarly serves as the “vector” to carry in the surface protein gene of SARS-CoV-2, the viral cause of the pandemic; two of these have advanced to large-scale, phase III efficacy studies in Russia and Pakistan.

In today’s issue of The Lancet, four veteran researchers raise a warning flag about those COVID-19 vaccine candidates by recounting their experience running a placebo-controlled AIDS vaccine trial dubbed STEP. An interim analysis of STEP found that uncircumcised men who had been naturally infected with Ad5 before receiving the vaccine became especially vulnerable to the AIDS virus. The vaccine, made by Merck, had been the leading hope for what was then a 20-year search for a shot that could thwart HIV. But after the STEP results appeared, the field went into a tailspin. “It took a decade to recover,” says one of the co-authors of the Lancet correspondence, Lawrence Corey of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Lancet study: Use of adenovirus type-5 vectored vaccines: a cautionary tale

http://archive.today/2021.10.21-144428/https://www.science.org/content/article/could-certain-covid-19-vaccines-leave-people-more-vulnerable-aids-virus

Categories
Opinion

Britain must not be sacrificed on the altar of fighting Covid-19 – Prof. Dingwall, Daily Mail

  • [The fight against Covid] ignores the devastating social and economic impact of Covid restrictions, and exaggerates the threat the disease poses.
  • Despite all the hysteria, this is not a modern plague.
  • In the week ending October 2, Covid accounted for just 3.2 per cent of all fatalities in British hospitals.
  • Even with the recent rise in infections, Covid mortality levels are drastically lower now than at the peak of the pandemic in the spring.
  • That toll may increase, but it is highly unlikely to reach the levels we saw in spring.
  • Covid-19 is a cruel disease that targets the old or those whose life expectancy is compromised by ill-health.
  • While every life is precious, the average age of patients who die with Covid-19 is 82.4.
  • Since August, just one otherwise healthy person under 30 has died with the disease, while in the same period only 97 victims have been younger than 60.
  • One study in June by the Office for National Statistics found 91 per cent of people who died with Covid in England and Wales between March and June had at least one pre-existing condition.
  • Contrary to the depressing propaganda, six in every seven people who are infected over the age of 90 actually survive.
  • [T]here is little convincing scientific evidence to support the belief that these venues are significant arenas of transmission.
  • Much of the North and the Midlands has been living with Covid restrictions for months, yet it has not stemmed the rise in positive cases.
  • There is not a single documented case of any student this autumn yet dying from Covid.
  • In 40 years, scientists have never found an HIV/AIDS vaccine, nor has one been discovered for the SARS virus in 18 years.
  • A vaccine will probably be more like an annual flu jab — which will give some protection but not stop you contracting the disease — rather than a measles vaccine, which provides a lifetime’s protection.
  • Edinburgh University argued that heavy-handed use of lockdowns and social distancing could cost between 149,000 and 178,000 lives over the course of the pandemic — far more than have died from Covid.
  • The Government likely borrowing more than £350 billion this year — will have be paid by generations to come.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8836699/Britain-not-sacrificed-altar-fighting-Covid-19-writes-Professor-ROBERT-DINGWALL.html

Categories
Opinion Videos

Prof Francois Balloux: the climate of fear on Covid is dangerous – UnHerd

Source: UnHerd, 8 Oct 2020
  • Scientists should not be involved in devising and implementing policies.
  • The window of opportunity to suppress the virus is gone.
  • The toll on public health caused by closed borders will be absolutely awful.
  • Indefinite suppression may not have ever been an option.
  • Vaccines may be helpful but won’t be a silver bullet.
  • The virus is here to stay.
  • Vaccines may be effective in reducing symptoms but we can’t gamble on an infection blocking vaccine.
  • Some vaccines aren’t always suitable for the entire population.
  • Banking everything on a vaccine is not a reasonable approach.
  • National level measures are not convincing; targeted measures have more potential.
  • Communication has been problematic so public trust has been lost.
  • Fear over a long period of time is physiologically unhealthy and doesn’t ever just evaporate.
  • The cost of allowing people to choose their own risk-level would be much lower than the current blanket proposals.
  • Well-targeted testing can be extremely effective but mass testing in schools is not a good use of tests.
  • The ‘medicalization’ of society is worrying.
  • Blanket testing of asymptomatic people is completely new and presents multiple ethical problems.
  • Proportion of asymptomatic cases for 2009 influenza pandemic was around 50%-75%; this is similar to what we’re finding COVID-19.
  • COVID-19 is not so different from other viruses but the global approach is completely different.
  • Normalising the mass testing of otherwise healthy testing is very dangerous.
  • There’s not much to be gained from comparing the measures and results between countries; the move to technocracy is dangerous.
  • Whole societies should not turn around public health.
  • A constant climate of fear is counter-productive.
  • There were other countries that took a similar approach to Sweden, such as Switzerland.
  • Past pandemics have been comparable to COVID-19 but did not have the same response.
  • Outbreaks in care homes is nothing new.
  • The pandemic phase of COVID-19 should eventually be over by mid to end of 2021 and in all likelihood become endemic.
  • The most important message: COVID-19 presents a severe health crisis but it is not a ‘new normal.’
Categories
Opinion

My manifesto to beat coronavirus crisis: Protect the elderly and vulnerable, let the rest live their lives, and throw Britain open again – Prof. David Livermore, Daily Mail

In fact, it is now becoming clear [Lockdown] is simply the wrong policy. Those who dissented from the Government’s Covid-19 strategy have been dismissed as mavericks on the fringes of the scientific establishment. However, this is no longer the case. I am afraid that the broadcast media has been particularly slow to reflect a shift in outlook among international scientists.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8816651/PROF-DAVID-LIVERMORE-manifesto-beat-coronavirus-crisis.html

Categories
Publications

Global perspective of COVID‐19 epidemiology for a full‐cycle pandemic – Prof. John Ioannidis, Wiley Online Library

  • As of October 2020, there are >1 million documented deaths with COVID‐19.
  • Many early deaths may have been due to suboptimal management, malfunctional health systems, hydroxychloroquine, sending COVID‐19 patients to nursing homes, and nosocomial infections; such deaths are partially avoidable moving forward.
  • About 10% of the global population may be infected by October 2020.
  • Global infection fatality rate is 0.15‐0.20%
  • Global infection fatality rate in those younger than 70 years old is 0.03‐0.04%.
  • Targeted, precise management of the pandemic and avoiding past mistakes would help minimize mortality.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13423

Categories
Opinion

An epidemic of failure: Test and Trace that doesn’t work, local lockdowns that don’t make sense, flu deaths counted as Covid-19… and an economy on the brink. We somehow made a crisis worse – Dr. John Lee, Daily Mail

  • The UK Government’s Test and Trace policy isn’t working and is worse than useless.
  • 40 per cent of those asked to name their recent contacts were unable to remember anyone.
  • The tests on which Test and Trace is based are highly unreliable.
  • Covid is a coronavirus and its symptoms are vague: a cough, a raised temperature, the loss of taste and smell — all of which overlap with the symptoms for flu and the common cold.
  • When the procedure goes wrong, it generates a ‘false positive’ result: it indicates an infection where none exists.
  • Even with long-established tests, we’d expect to see false positives in perhaps one per cent of cases. With this one, it could quite conceivably be 5 per cent or higher.
  • This means that if 300,000 tests are processed in a day, perhaps 15,000 or more will generate inaccurate reports of Covid-19 infection.
  • One positive is not necessarily the same as another, but the Government numbers don’t differentiate.
  • Last week, it was reported that just 1,800 out of 110,000 occupied beds in hospitals were taken up by Covid-19 patients.
  • It is likely that those who died were elderly and suffering from co-morbidities such as heart disease and diabetes.
  • But it is also possible that they died from something else entirely — such as flu.
  • The UK Government’s Test and Trace policy isn’t working and is worse than useless.
  • 40 per cent of those asked to name their recent contacts were unable to remember anyone.
  • The tests on which Test and Trace is based are highly unreliable.
  • Covid is a coronavirus and its symptoms are vague: a cough, a raised temperature, the loss of taste and smell — all of which overlap with the symptoms for flu and the common cold.
  • When the procedure goes wrong, it generates a ‘false positive’ result: it indicates an infection where none exists.
  • Even with long-established tests, we’d expect to see false positives in perhaps one per cent of cases. With this one, it could quite conceivably be 5 per cent or higher.
  • This means that if 300,000 tests are processed in a day, perhaps 15,000 or more will generate inaccurate reports of Covid-19 infection.
  • One positive is not necessarily the same as another, but the Government numbers don’t differentiate.
  • Last week, it was reported that just 1,800 out of 110,000 occupied beds in hospitals were taken up by Covid-19 patients.
  • It is likely that those who died were elderly and suffering from co-morbidities such as heart disease and diabetes.
  • But it is also possible that they died from something else entirely — such as flu.
  • Coronaviruses are as old as humanity and have resisted every attempt at a vaccine or a cure. One project to wipe out the common cold was funded for more than 40 years — and got nowhere.
  • Today’s flu vaccines are less than 50 per cent effective, and there is no chance whatever that a hurriedly developed Covid-19 vaccine could be anything like as good as that.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8808609/DR-JOHN-LEE-Test-Trace-doesnt-work-local-lockdowns-dont-make-sense.html

Categories
News

Sweden’s coronavirus success: How nation went OWN WAY to ‘lead fight against Covid-19’ – The Express

A CORONAVIRUS vaccine may work but will need years to take effect if it does. Even in this best case scenario, Covid-19 will probably never be truly eradicated.

In fact, Mr Tegnell says, if any country was “following the science” – the phrase favoured by Boris Johnson – sense advice to alert its population.

Long-term lockdowns and facemasks are not the answer, he believes. “I can understand some countries situations were so bad they needed to do something drastic and it was tempting to lockdown,” he says.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1343447/sweden-coronavirus-vaccine-no-lockdown

Categories
Opinion

We must learn to live with coronavirus – just like Samuel Pepys lived with the Great Plague

  • Humans have lived with infectious diseases for at least 15,000 years.
  • Until the early 2000s when we started to vaccinate for flu, we accepted that outbreaks would kill 20,000 to 50,000 people every winter without much comment.
  • Self-isolation is not appropriate if you do not share the living conditions of the elites who make the rules – and that the risk does not seem proportionate to the benefits for ordinary people.
  • Face covering, as practised, is irrelevant in most circumstances. The whole country should not be driven by the exceptional circumstances of rush hour in major cities. If most people are currently wearing face coverings, acknowledge that this is because they want to avoid trouble rather than to achieve protection.
  • We will never eradicate the threat from coronaviruses because they are so widespread among animal populations.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8776423/Coronavirus-UK-learn-live-covid-says-ROBERT-DINGWALL.html

Categories
Publications

The Treatment of Viral Diseases: Has the Truth Been Suppressed for Decades? – Dr. Lee Merritt, The Journal of the American Physicians and Surgeons

None of this, however, explains the 40 years of medical
misinformation and suppression of the pharmaceutical truth.
To have covered up the knowledge for four decades that
viruses could potentially be treated by antimicrobials required
extensive effort:

• Censorship. It is likely that some scientists were never
published again after authoring one paper on the antiviral benefits of CQ.
• Buying silence of news media. This is evident from the
blackout across the political news spectrum concerning
vaccine adverse effects. Pharmaceutical manufacturers
provide the most lucrative advertising for both written
and broadcast news programs.
• Misdirection. For years, pharmacology professors in
medical schools have perpetuated lies of omission.
• Lies by drug companies. Merck was caught publishing its
own “peer reviewed” journal to promote its drugs.54
• Regulatory capture. “Big Pharma” essentially owns the
FDA by being its biggest funder and employing more
than 58 percent of the FDA’s upper-level regulators and
administrators either before or after their tenure.55,56
• Research funding. Big Pharma is the major funder of
nearly all “independent” drug research, and there is no
incentive to research cheap/ less profitable solutions.

The COVID-19 pandemic is calling attention to the
potential for treating viral diseases with currently available
drugs, and exposing long-available but ignored research.
The implications of all this are very disturbing. Where have
the virologists been, and the CDC “experts” who claim to care
about influenza deaths? Has the burgeoning nearly trilliondollar vaccine industry been built at the expense of patients’
lives?

https://jpands.org/vol25no3/merritt.pdf

Categories
News

Revealed: Sir Patrick Vallance has £600,000 shareholding in firm contracted to develop vaccines – The Telegraph

The UK’s chief scientific adviser has a £600,000 shareholding in a drugs giant contracted to develop a Covid-19 vaccine for the Government, prompting claims of a potential conflict of interest.

  • Sir Patrick Vallance, Chief Scientific Adviser to UK Government, was president of GSK 2012 – 2018
  • Holds a deferred bonus of 43,111 shares worth £600,000
  • Cashed in more than £5m worth of shares upon resignation of GSK
  • Sir Vallance special board on vaccines

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/09/23/revealed-sir-patrick-vallance-has-600000-shareholding-firm-contracted/